A guide to navigating the complex world of technology management
A Platform Mindset presents a path for leading tech companies with a mindset focused on building structures to scale, innovate, and nurture both technical and inspired talent.
Basic concepts
Reusable platforms in a technology company
A platform is a system that can be used in more than one context. For example, Google initially wanted to build a search engine. But it didn’t just develop a search engine, it built a reusable platform instead. Google engineers wrote a system for code review, a generic system for testing, a system for deploying...
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Technology leader: changing the game
Being a technology leader is nothing like the cliché of an out-of-this-world-inspired person who can invent a great app every day or one who knows all the latest tech news on the market. To lead a technology team, you need to be someone who can constantly exchange ideas with colleagues from all areas of a...
See morePart I: Culture
How to build, develop, organize, and manage an effective and confident technology team.
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Dealing with scale and technical debt in a company
It’s difficult to predict whether a company will ever grow since most new businesses don’t flourish to that point in real life. If a company does grow, the leadership then needs to consider how to solve its challenges in each area with an eye to scale, because quick solutions tend to be chaotic to manage...
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The importance of creativity in technology
In addition to hiring, developing people’s abilities, and managing their careers in a structured way, for a technology company, it is essential to enable the engineering team to function as a high-performance team. Having the right, bright people assigned to projects that motivate them and align with their skills creates tremendous value for the organization....
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Y-career path in a technology company
It is a common mistake for technology managers to rush into promoting young employees who are starting to excel at work by allocating them to management positions. It is a widespread misconception that being promoted necessarily means assuming an administrative role, and that prestige, higher salaries, and impact are closely linked to the number of...
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Innovation: projects with different impact horizons
Innovation is essential for the existence and endurance of technology companies, so having professionals working on more experimental projects does not constitute a concession, but rather a business necessity. One way to encourage ideas to flourish is through formal programs in which, after a certain period in a department or project, the employee is encouraged...
See morePart II: Technology
Investing in the commonality of systems and engineering tools to encourage collaboration and consistency.
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Engineering tools as means for collaboration and productivity
Many senior managers don’t understand the importance engineering tools have in facilitating collaboration between developers and between teams, and they consider the day-to-day processes—the programming languages used, the testing environments, the validation system—just minor issues that need neither investment nor planning, due to the huge range of tools available on the market and to the...
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The neglected value of code reviews
Technical leadership is much more active on a day-to-day basis in code review than in writing code. The reviewing process is often considered less important or purely bureaucratic, when in reality it is central to any technology company. A large part of an organization’s technical direction should be done through code review, not meetings or...
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Reusable platforms provided by third parties in a tech company
The engineering and business platforms available on the market are becoming increasingly better, but they don’t solve 100% of a company’s problems and still need to be adapted and integrated into the organization’s systems. Despite the enormous versatility and usefulness of cloud services, it would be misguided to think that the cloud has everything a...
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Technology incidents and post-mortems
If the CEO of any company announces publicly that she or he is going to bring in a new CTO to finally put an end to technology incidents, you should know right away that this person will be spending money on hiring for nothing, because that’s such an unrealistic expectation that even the best CTO...
See morePart III: Leadership
The role of leadership in creating respectful and inclusive environments where innovation thrives.
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Leadership attributes in a technology company
Good leaders in the tech industry should: If a leader is too controlling and tries to be involved in every decision, this attitude directly affects how the team functions. The ideal scenario is that the engineering team’s processes work almost like an algorithm, with no room for comments like: “That person was only promoted because...
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CTOs and CEOs: Dealing with the bosses’ boss
It is part of the technology leader’s professional commitment to learn from the CEO and the other company leaders about all areas of the business, such as legal, human resources, and sales, and to educate them about technology so that together they can define the metrics used to evaluate the performance of the CTO and...
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Psychological security in the technology industry
The quality of the relationships works as a lubricant for the gears of collaboration in any organization. Many technology companies have been formed by young people in a highly competitive climate, with all efforts focused on growing fast and conquering the market. This has sometimes resulted in toxic working environments. The researcher Christine Porath has...
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Women in the technology industry
The low participation of women is a well-known shortcoming in the technology sector and should be a major concern to any organization. The leadership work can start with raising awareness and open communication about gender, diversity, and psychological safety issues. One point that can be stressed is to clarify concepts, for example, that when one...
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